A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decom...
Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed::A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft. The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
You'd think corporations would learn from these types of failures. But no, not as long as endless growth is the overall plan. The yes men will keep cutting corners at the expense of safety and quality.
“Our QC never finds any major issues, if we cut budget here, here and here we can increase EBIDTA, yada yada MOAR PROFITS since our processes are perfect anyway!”
For anyone interested what happened (according to some anonymous whistle-blower):
They had to remove the door plug to replace damaged pressure seal but didn't want to run QA on the plug after installing it back so they didn't mark it as 'removed' in the tracking system, they simply treated it as door that were "opened". Parts were missed when inserting the plug, QA didn't check because it wasn't in the system, plane was delivered to the client. The rest is history.
There' s a lot of backstory to it but that's the direct cause. Supposedly.
Yes, but you can't inspect quality into a product; you have to build it into the product.
Years ago, some American auto executives toured a Toyota factory to learn from them. After the tour, one of them said, "Those sneaky Japanese, they didn't show us their rework area." What he didn't know was that unlike American factories, there was no rework area. Everything was assembled correctly the first time, and any worker had the right to stop the assembly line at any time to fix a problem. It's far easier than finding and fixing a defect that is buried deep in a finished product.
You know, I’d be perfectly fine if they nationalized the company for as long as it takes to restore a deep and unshakable sense of “you do not fuck with QA” to Boeing.
Their current board and corporate leadership should be prosecuted for criminal negligence for allowing it to get this bad after the MCAS crashes, and moreover after they publicly committed to drastically improving QA and general safety policies following those crashes.
Time to start arresting people at the top and work your way down. Also Pete Buttigieg needs to answer why it has taken so long for the grounding of the 737 Max 9.
What's his nuts saying he changed Boeing so it was run like a business instead of an engineering firm is precisely where things were guaranteed to go to shit. Wasn't a matter of if, only when.
People who know more than me have pointed out that the the hole in the fuselage and the plug found on the ground don't show the kind of damage you'd expect if the bolts were present and secure.
So them being absent entirely is consistent with the publicly available evidence.